‘The Affair’ Season 4 Premiere Recap: California Dreamin’

Maura Tierney and Dominic West in a scene from “The Affair.”CreditCreditPaul Sarkis/Showtime

By Sean T. Collins

June 17, 2018

Season 4, Episode 1

On the surface, Helen Solloway has a perfect life now.

Indeed, she sardonically says as much to her therapist, played by the “Family Ties” ur-father, Michael Gross, in one of several welcome cameos in this week’s Season 4 premiere of “The Affair.” Her two older children are away at college, where they both seem to have settled down after the previous turmoil. Her younger kids are a pair of cherubs, the older of whom, Trevor, is on the verge of coming out thanks to an intense puppy-love relationship with his classmate Brooklyn. (Helen misgenders the kid as a girl at first; Noah thinks Trevor is talking about their native borough.) Having moved to Los Angeles, she has a new partner, Vik Ullah, who is chief of surgery at a prestigious hospital there, earning enough money to buy them a palatial house in the hills and ensure that Helen need never work again if she doesn’t want to.

But things are never simple in this show of shifting perspectives; Helen’s frequent quasi-hallucinations of earthquake tremors, in the half of the premiere presented from her perspective, tell a different story.

Helen may have escaped her own awful, alternately domineering and absent parents, but now she has Vik’s smilingly vicious mother (the hilarious Zenobia Shroff, of “The Big Sick”) to contend with. And Trevor’s not-quite-confirmed homosexuality brings up weird, less-than-woke associations in Helen’s mind, primarily the idea that this is somehow Noah’s “fault” for being absent during much of the kid’s childhood; this is clearly less about her having a problem with her son’s being gay and more about her problem with his dad’s being gone. In fact, Helen comes to believe that Noah is the trigger for her earthquake episodes, his continued presence in her life a disaster waiting to happen. (He, too, has moved to California, in order to stay close to the kids.)

“That’s a little unfair, don’t you think?” he asks when she says as much to him; the guy did go to prison for three years on her behalf, taking the rap for a fatal accident during which she, not he, was behind the wheel.

“No, I don’t,” she retorts, coldly and firmly. But Noah is presented here as so much more reasonable than he is elsewhere during Helen’s half of the episode — he’s mostly an angry, obscenity-spewing mess — that the portrayal likely betrays her true assessment.

Most intriguing, given the show’s title, is that Helen seems uncharacteristically smitten with her next-door neighbor, an incredibly Californian young woman named Sierra. She’s played by Emily Browning, a searingly smart actor who is often the best thing in any project she’s involved with (Bryan Fuller’s fantasy misfire “American Gods,” for example); I think I’m as excited as Helen is to see what effect Sierra’s avocado-picking, goat-yoga–practicing free spirit has on Helen’s life.

As befits the mind-set of a man who feels he has done all that was ever asked of him but has never been given his due, Noah’s half of the episode is less glamorous, more gritty and revealing of his self-conception as the main character in everyone’s story, whether those people like it or not.

He has secured a new job as a teacher in a charter school called Compton Academy, where both the students and faculty are a series of stereotypes straight out of a bad movie about the latest white savior of the schoolyard. Precociously flirty Latina girls come on to him in class. A troubled young black man in a defiant, symbolically charged hoodie possesses a genius-level intellect only Noah is capable of seeing. When she’s not busy watching over Noah’s shoulder, the school’s imperious African-American principal, Jenelle Wilson (Sanaa Lathan), dogs the student with false plagiarism accusations. These are revealed by an unctuous Teach for America type on the faculty, who voices the anti-affirmative-action complaints Noah can’t quite bring himself to lodge and then brazenly asks for Noah’s help in getting his manuscript (“East of Pasadena,” eye roll) to the right people.

Helen treats him like dirt, Vik condescends to him, his kids just kind of tolerate him, and neither Alison nor his estranged best friend, Max, will return his phone calls. Woe is him.

Does the series still work? Did it ever? Appropriately, that may depend on your perspective. There’s an old saw taken from therapists and their countless dramatized depictions that sums up the experience of watching “The Affair” quite neatly: “How does that make you feel?” And from its very first hour, when its multi-perspective template was established, this series has emphasized feeling, serving more as a vehicle for impressionism rather than for realism. The differences among its characters’ competing histories speak to a basic truth about the unreliability of memory, but some of them are probably too major to explain away as tricks of the mind. (I mean, two totally different people saved the same kid from choking to death all the way back in the pilot.) As such, I have long believed that the best way to process “The Affair” is as a portrait of those mindsets, not as an effort to reconstruct the truth.

Viewed from that perspective, all the sex, lies, self-destruction, screaming matches and occasional violent outbursts and murder mysteries are merely the screen on which the series projects its kaleidoscopic picture — a picture of the ways in which grief, guilt, lust, love, parenthood, couplehood, marriage, divorce, age, class and (especially) the limits of traditional gender roles replace reality, deep down inside us. And if you can accept that, then “The Affair” winds up looking like one of the smartest, most observant, most empathetic things on television — the most truly adult show since “Mad Men.” You just have to let yourself feel it.

So how does it feel? Not always great, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Helen and (especially) Noah aren’t merely unreliable narrators in this episode, they’re also unpleasant ones. The series — and the actors Maura Tierney and Dominic West — isn’t afraid to make these people ugly, and to look ugly doing it. They pay the price every time a viewer or critic says, “Get your act together, Helen,” or, “Ugh, Noah is the worst.” But expecting otherwise treats that ugliness (to echo Helen) as if it were the show’s “fault” rather than its strength. That misses the point.

Because if you’ve reached adulthood without ever failing to get your act together or being the worst … well, bless your heart, because that sure doesn’t look like life from where I’m sitting. “The Affair” — angry, guilty, horny, and as restless as the ocean Fiona Apple sings about in the opening credits — does.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the half of the Season 4 premiere told from Helen’s perspective as the first half. It was the second.

Correction:

An earlier version also misidentified the relationship between Helen and Vik. They are partners, not married.